So much sand, so few people ... ninety mile beach. Photograph: Herbert Stadler/Corbis

Sand yachting

There's a strip of sand in the north of New Zealand called Ninety Mile Beach. It's more like 60, as it happens, but that's still a lot of finely crushed seashell. Amazingly, it's classified as a highway and is driven on daily by tour buses, which seems a waste of surf and sand. Searching for an alternative way to explore the area, I read about the Blokart, a Kiwi-designed sailing dinghy on wheels, and realised the beach and the kart should go together, with me on top.

Although Blokarts are normally rented out at the southern end of the beach for an hour or two's pootling around, I discovered it would be possible to make a guided overnight trip, fishing for my supper and attempting to navigate the entire beach from south to north, to within hiking distance of the tip of New Zealand. It might take just a few hours of sailing, depending on the wind, or you might not get there at all. That sounded like a proper adventure to me. All I needed was an experienced Blokarter, for sailing tuition en route, and a guide with a 4x4 support vehicle.

Phil O'Kell of Blokart handled the karting side; Marty Benson, of Cape Reinga Adventures, drove the support vehicle, provided camping and fishing gear, and filled the role of a Kiwi Crocodile Dundee.

Near Kaitaia, at the southern end of Ninety Mile Beach, is Taharangi Marie Lodge, a convenient starting point and an extraordinary initiation into Northland's seafood. Most of the food was gently splashing about in the sea until it met the lodge's owner. Ronnie is not just a rod and line man; for him even scuba diving is about lunch. Which explains the appearance of sea urchins at dinner. This is not a practical joke, it's the eggs inside the critter you're after, for one of your more pungent encounters with Maori cuisine.

The island's early inhabitants displayed a similar capacity for enjoying seafood, consuming millions of tua-tuas, the shellfish that are still gathered locally at low tide. Half-way along the beach are huge bleached mounds, whose layers reveal communal cooking fires, traces of tools and bones and the shells of everything on the menu across the years.

To reach them there's a sail to be rigged and the low tide to catch. The Blokart's three wheels run fast on wet sand, allowing you to go two or three times the speed of the wind when it's coming from the right quarter.

It usually does - the North Island is just a few miles wide at this point, barely more than a spit of sand between the Tasman Sea and Pacific Ocean - and your take-off can't fail to impress, either you in the driving seat or any of the seagulls and seal pups who happen to be watching. So much power without an engine is hard to believe, as though a huge hand is pushing you smoothly across the sand.

Absurdly simple to drive, even for non-sailors, the Blokart accelerates to ludicrous speeds before you can say, "where are the brakes?" Not that it matters, because there are none. Controls are limited to handle bars which steer the front wheel and a rope to haul in the sail. Pull it too hard and you'll be wearing the scenery. The instructions for this quite likely event are simple: trust the seat belt and don't stick your arms out, or they will break.

Soaring dunes to your right, crashing waves to your left, the 60 miles of hard sand are broken only by occasional streams cutting clefts across the beach. These are deep enough to break your Blokart, and you, if you hit them at full tilt. Otherwise it's a carefree ride, fun like your first swooping downhill on a bike, laughing out loud with a mixture of exhilaration, disbelief and terror.

You don't know "fast" until you've done it this way, the smooth sand rushing close by. Only high tide or the calm of nightfall can stop you.

At which point, camping beach-side is the way to go. There's a campsite off the beach at Hokatere but if you have enough freshwater, you can also stay at The Bluff, where Te Wakatehaua Island marks the sole interruption along the entire length of the beach.

There was nothing and no one but the three of us for miles around. With no light pollution and a horizon broken only by the dunes behind and the pillow lava formations of the island to seaward, this was one of the most spectacular views of the southern night skies I'll ever witness.

The isolation and the pounding surf were just as the early Polynesian settlers - the Maori forefathers - experienced it a thousand years ago, having navigated extraordinary distances by sun and stars. Under the circumstances, failing to catch your dinner feels slightly like letting the ancestral side down and so did the contingency plan: three cans of beans boiled in a saucepan.

The tables turned the next morning. Before breakfast the kahawai - a local coastal fish - were practically throwing themselves at our feet. Locals are sniffy about their taste but freshly fried they were the essence of this wild tip of the North Island.

With perfect wind on our side, the final leg was over almost before it had begun. We ripped towards the looming flax-covered headland, leaving two tour buses trundling in our wake - the only ones we saw during the trip - happy to know that not only were we having more fun than their passengers but we were going faster too. We reached Scott Point, at the end of this magnificent stretch of sand, within an hour. That left just a hike along the coastal path to Cape Reinga, from where Maori spirits depart for their ancestral homelands.

From this vantage point, with the tremendous mass of the Southern Ocean behind you, and the Pacific and Tasman Sea sweeping across the remaining points of the compass, it's easy to feel the power of the place.

As for the Blokarting: "It's over, Rover," was the way Marty saw it.

Unless you turn round and sail back for some more of Ronnie's cooking.Eric Kendall

Horse riding

'It was as get-away-from-it-all as can be and an utter, exhilarating joy'

It had been an age since I was last in the saddle, and having gaily signed up for two days' riding I now quaked at the prospect. Recalling my abortive attempt to stay on a beautiful but unhinged creature by the name of Crazy Kerry on a previous trip didn't help.

To a questionnaire asking about my previous experience I replied that I was hoping for a horse that wasn't too flighty, but nor too staid.

And so I met Tacker, a gentle-looking creature of somewhat advanced years, who had apparently once been a bit of a goer but had since settled down. Phew.

Tacker and I were chaperoned on the 48-hour trek - the "Overnighter" - by Matt, on board Hocus Pocus, a capricious beast who shied at everything. He was even spooked by his own reflection in the water trough.

After a commendably concise safety briefing ("Wanna hat?"), Matt gave me a leg up into the deep armchair of a saddle, and off we set.

Hurunui Horse Treks is an hour's drive north of Christchurch in the rugged high country of North Canterbury. Set amid an utterly unspoilt landscape of wide open pastures, rivers, hills and distant snow-capped mountains, the land is farmed by a few hardy souls and there is no cause to come here unless tending sheep, horse-trekking or disappearing.

We rode along the Waitohi River as it threaded its way across the plain, and Tacker was disarmingly responsive and understanding. We meandered sedately in brilliant sunshine, gawping at the scenery and the wildlife - mainly hares, rabbits, paradise ducks, harrier hawks, geese and quail. Oh, and sheep galore. The yellow gorse was in bloom, filling the air with the warm smell of coconut.

We lunched on huge sandwiches by an abandoned village known as Lanky Town, named after the Lancastrians who settled here to mill flax before leaving to build roads during the Gold Rush.

In the afternoon, we rode the old gold trail up into the hills. We trotted occasionally but it was hard to get up speed on the narrow hillside paths. Just as the pace began to tell on my backside, we reached Seven Hills Station, my base for the night. We unsaddled the horses, brushed them down and turned them loose. After five hours in the saddle, my legs were very, very stiff.

Matt went home while I stayed in the nearby homestead (to British eyes more a suburban bungalow plonked in the wild than a farmhouse) as a guest of octogenarians Jack and Nancy. There were just the three of us and Jack was thrilled to have company.

"I love it when trekkers come through," he said. "Only time I get pudding."

And what a pudding! An enormous home-made chocolate sponge with ice cream and custard preceded by boiled beef and veg. A bottle of Kiwi sauvignon later and I fell asleep in my chair, listening to Jack's yarns.

Next day, we rode 2,500ft up into the foothills of Mount Self, the wind roaring around us. It was thrillingly wild, with jaw-dropping views of the craggy, wonderfully named Hooligan Range and beyond, across the plain, to distant blue hills beneath a vast expanse of sky. I felt every inch the cowboy, especially when we opened the throttle and galloped alongside the Hurunui River.

We rode for five hours, with a break for lunch, and in all that time we never saw another soul. It was as get-away-from-it-all as can be and an utter, exhilarating joy.

I swear there were tears in Tacker's eyes as we parted. There were in mine. Jonathan Ray

Walking

'Our walk enabled us to savour the landscape while preserving a sense of the remote'

The mountain ridges were glistening white, the fresh snowline reaching down into the beech forests as the water taxi dropped us off at the far end of Lake Rotoiti, in Nelson Lakes national park. There were three of us: two British walkers, now members of the bus-pass generation but experienced in Scottish hill-walking; and a young New Zealander, Ryan Kelly, who runs a guiding company called Southern Wilderness. Our goal was to follow the lakeside track back to the mountain resort of St Arnaud.

We had chosen this walk mainly for the drama of being taken into the heart of the New Zealand wilderness. The most popular routes, like the long-distance Milford Track, are heavily used in the summer, but our walk away from the honeypots of Queenstown and Milford Sound would enable us to savour the landscape while preserving a sense of the wild and remote. There was also the opportunity to learn about an intriguing ecological experiment.

Ryan led us across a sandy estuary to a wooden hut beside a cluster of thorn shrubs. It is one of hundreds of huts maintained by New Zealand's Department of Conservation to provide staging posts and accommodation for walkers - known in New Zealand as trampers. It consisted of a single room with 30 bunks and a dining and kitchen area. Although it had no power supply, it did have running water and a set of toilets behind the thorn bushes - by the standard of Scottish bothies we had known, this was luxury indeed.

Ahead of us lay the six-mile walk alongside the lake. But first there was another luxury in store. Ryan was unloading food - an array of smoked salmon, chicken, salami, salad and cheeses - which we ate sitting on the porch of the hut, encircled by the gleaming white peaks.

After lunch, we took the path into the beech forest. It was hauntingly beautiful, with shafts of light penetrating the overhead canopy and dappling the forest floor. The path undulated between the contour lines, skirting the top of cliffs, then dropping to the gravel strand beside the lake. In places, the ground underfoot was springy with leaf mould, in others, we had to pick our way through a latticework of giant beech roots.

Shrubs abounded, like the koromiko, with its long thin leaves, once used to treat dysentery, and the stinkwood, which smells like a pungent French cheese. Around us too were the sing-song chimes of the diminutive bellbird, and the distinctive call of the kaka parrot, a rippling whistle alternating with a plaintive croak.

There was a salutary ecological tale to accompany the bird song. The bellbird and kaka are survivors from New Zealand's indigenous wilderness, predating both the Maoris and the Europeans. By accident and by design, the settlers brought with them mammals, birds and insects that have caused ecological havoc.

Birds such as the kaka and stitchbird had evolved without predators and so were defenceless against the rats, stoats and possums that the settlers introduced. Most vulnerable was the kiwi, a flightless bird which lays one solitary giant egg - making it particularly ironic that it should have been selected as New Zealand's national symbol.

As Ryan explained, Lake Rotoiti is one of a number of locations where naturalists are attempting to restore the indigenous species by creating ecological "islands" free of predators. Beside our path we spotted the traps laid for stoats, which feed on kaka eggs. These efforts are paying off. At Lake Rotoiti, the bellbird and kaka have been staging a comeback. And the DoC has observed three kiwi chicks that had grown large enough to fend off the predators.

From ahead came an insistent rumbling sound that proved to be a river in spate, swollen by melt water and immersing the stepping stones that usually provide a footing. Ryan waded across, the water surging up to his knees, then returned to show us the safest passage. There were two more rivers to negotiate and at the third we plunged across like veterans.

By now the wind was rising and clouds were shrouding the ridges, a sign that bad weather was set to return. But further along the shoreline, we spotted the jetty near St Arnaud, where we had set off six hours before. When we reached it we subsided in a mixture of weariness and exhilaration. Ryan, who had scarcely drawn breath, seemed pleased with what his charges had achieved.

We had been given an enticing taste of the wilderness, at once both grand and intimate, and had seen just two other pairs of walkers all day. We were a world away from the adrenaline sports that people flock to New Zealand for. Our walk, modest enough, had given us a slow-burn appreciation of New Zealand's breathtaking scenery and wildlife. And when you have crossed the planet to get there, why not take all the time you can to enjoy it? Peter and Leni Gillman